


The Circus Joins You

by Giddygeek



Category: Mirrormask
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Giddygeek/pseuds/Giddygeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No matter what anyone else says, I think you're a good tower."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Circus Joins You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unsettled](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsettled/gifts).



They were moving on from one exotic locale to the next, Valentine and his tower. Really, the timing was good; perfect, in fact. It wasn't that they'd been kicked off the pier, Valentine's favorite pier, the one where the waves carried in the laughter of the porpoises that had the long, flowing manes and the saucy, sassy tails. No, it was just that Valentine had been ready to seek another home port, and the pier patrol had finally given him an excuse to go.

An excuse with sharp edges, certainly, but since the pier patrol was fashioned entirely out of bits of old shipwrecks, that was hardly anything new.

"And it was dull here," he said, and his tower hummed around him with the effort of moving. Valentine thought it sounded like agreement. "Too many tourists, not enough tours, if you see what I mean. And those porpoises; if I heard them laughing for one more night, the gentle chiming sounds and feeling of joy would have driven me right out of my mind!"

The tower hummed again and the lights flared. Perhaps it was not so much agreement, then; she had always liked the porpoises. But Valentine hadn't seen his tower out in the streets, hard at work, attempting to pay the docking fees, now had he? Towers that didn't work had little right to complain about their accommodations.

Valentine tossed his arm over his mask, hid his eyes from the bright lights, and said, "The crowds are better anyway, closer to the heart of the city. Not like these boring creatures here, these lackluster, prattling critics with no appreciation for _art_ or _spectacle_ \--"

The hum changed, going lower and darker in tune. Valentine rolled off his sofa and onto the floor, patted it fondly. "I knew you'd come to see it my way," he said. "Now, if you could just ease down--ease, you know, a soft landing, instead of an awful, jarring hop?"

The tower settled down with an awful, jarring hop.

From the safety of his place on the floor (long experience having taught him about the tone of that particular hum), Valentine sighed. Around him, glass shattered, metal rattled, and his collection of the tiny dolls with the heads that bobble crashed to the floor with much shrieking and complaining. Valentine would have to soothe their tempers later, while they stared at him in a line of irritable, jiggling faces. If they didn't sometimes offer some of the best critiques he'd ever heard of his performances, tempered with astonishing good taste and sincerely charming flattery, well. He'd have tossed them out a window and into one of the more ravenous dark forests long, long ago.

He jumped to his feet and looked outside; the dolls and disaster could wait for later. For the moment--yes, yes, the tower had done well. They were in the heart of the city which, even as burnt-out as it was as the darkness crept in, teemed with people--metal people, tin people, clockwork and gold people, animal people, and masked people too. Diversity, acceptance, pockets jingling with coins and spare parts: exactly what Valentine had been needing.

"Well done," he said, hand on the wall. "No matter what anyone else says, I think you're a good tower. A wonderful tower, really. An absolute gem among piles of rocks."

The wall shuddered. The tower might just have been settling, but Valentine rather thought she was pleased by the praise.

He added, "Although, these landings--" because it was always good for the tower to have an improvement to work towards, a goal-- "They aren't quite enough, you know, for the landings of the tower of a very important man."

The tower finished settling with a thump that almost, but didn't quite, knock Valentine off his feet.

He caught his balance and straightened his clothes, grabbed his tools, and clattered down the stairs. "And don't lock the door behind me!" he called out before he closed the door; it locked behind him with a decisive thunk. Sometimes she just didn't listen. Ah well, eventually she'd get over her snit, she always did, and he'd be let back in--he always was.

Eventually.

~~~

Valentine didn't bring guests back to the tower. For one, it had proved to be difficult to keep friends when one had his degree of wit and vibrancy; the envy he faced every day, oh, it was a sadness. It cast a pall on his otherwise charmed existence.

Also, the tower had proven fiercely protective. She shook and shimmied and gave splinters to those she had deemed unworthy of Valentine's time, when he'd tried to bring guests home with him, and she had deemed _everyone_ unworthy. After all, Valentine was a very important man, and he was the _most_ important man so far as his tower was concerned. It was just _impossible_ to entertain guests she found acceptable.

And it was often necessary, at the end of a long day spent delighting throngs of people, rapt audiences who merely played at being bored or bemused or otherwise less than thoroughly disarmed, to have a quiet place of solitude. Valentine often returned to the tower to practice for the next audience, as unappreciative as it might be.

So Valentine didn't have a lot of guests to the tower because he neither needed nor wanted them there, in his glorious refuge.

That was what he told the dolls with the bobbling heads, anyway, as they gave him their sad eyes during his dinner of poached meat-of-something (fried, but he had poached it from the vendor, and that was what counted) and dessert of this-or-that en flambe (well, it had been on fire when it was thrown at him, anyway).

He gave the sad eyes back, saying, "Really, it's just _disgusting_ , you shouldn't toss them around like that. Stop it. Stop it. I don't want your sympathy, there's no _need_ for this wretched display--"

The littlest doll handed him a tiny, beating wool heart, which turned into a flock of even tinier wool doves when he tried to replace it in her porcelain chest. Fifteen tiny heads wobbled backwards to watch their flight; Valentine covered his food to protect it from tiny lint droppings, and glared at the shelf. The bobbling headed creatures were just dolls. What did they know, anyway.

~~~

The tower had been a gift, of sorts. Had made Valentine a gift of herself, anyway. Valentine had gone to her with a man from the outer edges of the city, back when the edges were an even more terrible place to be. He had just left his mother's home of his own volition, of course, and not at all because she'd ordered him to go. He'd had no food, or money, or place to sleep. The man from the edges had said that he was very important, had his own tower in fact, had prospered there. He'd promised Valentine all three of the things he most needed, with his rainbow-silver hands held out for Valentine to read, sincerity warming the colors of his palms. His iridescent mask had gone all peaches and golds.

Valentine had gone with him, not because he was tired or hungry and missed his mum; certainly not because he'd been afraid not to go. Valentine was always brave and cheerful, oh yes. His steadfast strength of character was admired far and wide. Even then. Perhaps especially then; living life as a very important man tended to dull one's sharper, more tenacious edges.

The tower hadn't _liked_ that previous occupant. Valentine had felt it as soon as they approached her. She had been cold and trembling and perhaps afraid, perched on her foot in a way Valentine learned quickly meant she did not at all want to be where she was. Her unhappiness had been as obvious to Valentine as her door and window. He had been fascinated, had laid a hand on her rough claw and stroked it, said, "Why, you're shivering."

The shiver had stilled, and Valentine had almost _felt_ the tower considering him, taking him in; he had tilted his head back to look up at her, fascinated, not afraid.

The tower had hopped then, just a little jump, after which Valentine had discovered that she'd landed directly on the man with the rainbow hands and peach-gold mask. He stared at the mess on the ground. All that silver was fading to black, and the gold was going white. A puddle of blue soaked into the dusty street.

The man from the outer edges of the city had held a weapon in his hand, Valentine saw. He must have taken it from somewhere in his enormous coat after he'd shown Valentine his palms.

He'd also carried a set of glowing balls, Valentine realized in cleaning out his pockets for anything that might be of use, and a little baton in the hiding place slotted into in his left arm.

Valentine had taken them, then turned to the tower and said, "You know, I've never been _protected_ before. Would you--would you like me to come inside?"

The tower had settled down against the ground lightly, like a feather to water, and the door swung open, silent and somehow welcoming. It was dark inside, and cold. Valentine climbed the stairs, said, "You are very lovely, tower. I like what you've done with the place. But wouldn't it be even nicer to have some light, perhaps, and heat?"

The tower had given him light, and warmth, and a safe place to sleep. She'd been protective and comforting from the very beginning. In return, Valentine had given her solitude, unbroken by the frightened lovers and the immoderate rages of the previous tenant. It was a fruitful partnership, Valentine thought; productive and well-suited to both parties. They stayed together for a very, very long time.

~~~

After their last little bout of angry words and humming silences, Valentine had refused to apologize, and the tower had refused to come to him, but that was all right. Every important man needed to return to his roots once in a while, to rediscover his humble beginnings.

And Valentine had been entirely correct, of course. A swimming pool of cocoa would have made a _delightful_ addition to their current living arrangements.

But he was glad to see his tower, when she finally came to his aid. Not only because she saved them, he and Helena, but because he had missed her. It was hard to feel important when you had no tower, much like how it had proved difficult to feel satisfied with your earnings when they'd been got in the process of betraying Helena.

Helena, whom the fussy, overprotective tower liked.

The tower opened warmly for them, humming a sweet note Valentine had never heard from it before. When Helena put on the mask, as the world went to chaos around them, the tower's hum had reached a fevered pitch.

And Valentine could have sworn, would have sworn, that he heard the tower hum _yes_ as the world began to go dark.

~~~

"There's no more windows left," Helena said. "It's over. She won."

Valentine blinked at the place where the window had been; for years, he had seen the world through it, light and dark beneath them, full of life and porpoises and tin men, and now it was gone. Crumpled dark. Nothing beyond it, and the tower shrinking around them.

But faintly, he heard a crackling sound, like thin ice underfoot, distant and far-off; it had a chime to it that Valentine recognized. He wondered if sound had crumpled too, if he and Helena would sound like that shortly, before they sounded like nothing at all.

The chime again, and--oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Valentine grinned and grabbed Helena's hand.

"Valentine, what are you _doing_ ," she said, pulling back but not very hard, her fingers curling between his. The mask glittered in the drawing darkness as Valentine hurried her down the stairs.

"No more windows," he said, clattering down the last steps. "But I think there might be--"

"Oh," Helena said, and Valentine laid his hand on the rough stone wall as his tower's doorbell chimed again, crackling and broken; chimed for the last time.

Valentine nodded at her, squeezed her hand and pushed her forward. "Yes," he said, falling back. "A _door_."

~~~

Sometimes Valentine had weird dreams.

One night, he dreamed of Helena juggling with him on a bridge while people who looked like toys creaked past, and fish who looked like rainbows swam through the air. One night, he dreamed of a thousand locks and a single shining key. Once, while he was sleeping on the sofa with the cat on his chest and sunshine on his face, he dreamed of filling his hands with cold gems. The glossy stones cut his palms and weighed him down. Helena watched him pocket them, and he knew he was betraying her, hurting himself just by doing so; he scrabbled for more of them anyway.

When he woke up from a nap on the sofa (the cat nowhere to be found, the skies overcast and drizzling), he stumbled to the kitchen. He'd dreamed this time that he was very alone; all alone, except for a tower that loved him and a doll with sad, detachable eyes in its eerily bobbing head. His mouth was very dry, and he felt a bit dizzy.

Helena was perched on her stool by the counter, drawing pad in hand. He gulped down a glass of water and then went to stand by her shoulder, looking down upon her work. "You've made my nose too big," he said, squinting at the image of himself, asleep on the sofa in his favorite fashion, the cat curled up with him and one of Helena's mum's ugly quilts tucked around them both.

Helena had sketched their house around him, as if she were standing outside looking in; she often drew him in the house, warm and content. He liked it. He always had a home, in Helena's drawings.

"Also, the cat looks like people."

"Does she?" Helena asked. She sat back to consider his critiques, and her shoulder bumped against his; Valentine wrapped an arm around her.

"Mmm," he said, and nuzzled her hair. "I know it was my choice to name her Sphinx, but you've gone a little creepy there, my darling, my very favorite. I think perhaps the overall composition of this piece would be improved if you made her a little more kitty, and a little less...voracious."

"You might be right," Helena said, turning her head a little to look at him from the corner of her eye, a smile twitching at her mouth. Sometimes, Helena got a look to her like she knew something Valentine didn't, something amusing, or perhaps infinitely profound. Valentine liked that look. It made him feel both foolish and proud of himself, though he didn't know how.

"I often am right," he said, kissing her temple, the corner of her soft, smiling mouth. He remembered the feeling of his dream, and was glad to have found Helena here, working, warm and content. He kissed her again, persuasively, and she chuckled a little, put down her pad and pen and turned to him.

He urged her up to her feet and took her hand, drew back a little to smile at her. Filling his hands with her seemed like a good way, a very good way, to banish the last sad traces of his dream, to feel less alone, home, loved. "I'm a very intelligent man, you know," he said, and led her up to bed.


End file.
